Integrating social media into your WordPress site is easy, and it has the potential to help you grow your audience. One of your readers really appreciates one of your posts, and he or she would love to share that content with their friends who may also find it helpful.

By integrating social media, you’re making it easy for your readers to spread the word within their social circle. Before you know it, their social circle has become a part of your ever-expanding audience. All you need to do is use the right tools, and your posts will practically promote themselves.

Use a Profile Widget

Profile widgets show your readers your social media profile. These occupy a lot of space, so you won’t want to crowd your website with them. Pick the social network you use the most (usually Facebook) and display it with the widget. Your readers will be able to follow you on the platform of your choosing, or like your Facebook page without having to leave the page. It’s a one-click connection that’s easy for anyone to make. No one will have to go out of their way to find you on social media.

Add Some Buttons

Some WordPress themes already incorporate the option to add social media buttons to your posts. All you have to do is copy and paste your URLs and enable these buttons. You can even configure these buttons to open links in a new tab, so they won’t redirect users away from your WordPress site. If your theme incorporates this feature, you’d be a fool not to use it. It’s easy, and anyone can do it. If it doesn’t, you can manually input buttons or find a plugin that will incorporate the buttons for you.

Share Plugins

One-click sharing is the ultimate convenience. Your readers won’t have to copy and paste a link onto the social media platform they want to use. They’ll click a button, get a popup, add some text to the top, and hit share. As long as you make it easy for them to spread the word on your behalf and provide content worth sharing, the content will practically move itself. There are many WordPress plugins that can place one-click sharing, and there’s no better way to grow your audience.

Autoposting Plugins

After you’ve posted content, you probably manually share all of that content on all of your social networks to inform your audience that you’ve added something new. Rather than following that process step by step, you can get an auto posting plugin. This plugin is designed to cross post all of your content to every social media platform of your choosing as soon as you publish it. It saves you time and informs your whole audience simultaneously.

Mobile Friendly Combo Plugins

If mobile loading times are an issue for your WordPress site, you may have some difficulty trying to find a way to incorporate social media without further delaying the loading times of your site. If this is the case, you may need something like the Social Media Feather plugin. This plugin incorporates sharing buttons and follow buttons, and it does so without any JavaScript. Removing the JavaScript from the equation will help your site respond faster from smartphone and tablets.

There’s a WordPress tool for everything, and all of these tools make it easy to connect your website to your social media platforms. All it takes is a few seconds to set things up, and you’ve put yourself on the main grid.

With a background in Marketing, Jane Bolto currently works as a Content Specialist at Nybizdb.com.

Building a WordPress site can be a bit confusing. There’s a ton of new terminology and things probably feel a lot different than that other website builder you were using.

That’s how I felt when I started learning WordPress anyway.

Part of me thought I’d never get it down. But, here I am today, teaching people like you how to get the most out of their investment!

In today’s article, I’m talking about the main WordPress components, where they’re generally located and how you can use them for your business. Let’s go!

Header

The WordPress header is located at the top of your website. It’ll most likely contain your logo and is one of the first things visitors see when they look at your page. You can see on my website, I use my header as a space for both my logo, social media icons and main navigation (which is a section we’ll get to in a minute).

Headers are customizable in a few ways:

Background Color

Width and Height

Header Image (i.e. logo)

Link from Header Image to Home Page

Depending on your theme, you may be able to edit each of these things from within your Theme or Appearance options. Otherwise, you’ll need to make alterations directly in the stylesheet.

Main Navigation

Visitors can meander through your site in several ways, assuming you have a good internal linking structure. But the most direct path is the main navigation. It’s here that you will highlight the most important pages on your website. At the top level, it typically includes Home, About, Services and Contact pages. But you can also use sub-navigation. Here’s what that looks like on my site.

The main navigation should offer a logical path for visitors to walk through your site. Lead them with important pages at the top level with supporting pages as sub-navigation.

Slider

Sliders are great when you have multiple announcements or call-to-actions that visitors need to see. Visitors can manually scroll through the slides, or your can set them to rotate automatically.

It’s up to you!

You’ll notice that I’m not using a slider, per se. But this area on my site with the image is where a slider would typically go. Again, it’s your call on how to use this. For me, I like how it displays my unique selling proposition every time someone comes to the site.

Footer

I like to think about footer areas as our own feet – they’re incredibly useful but highly underappreciated. When was the last time you truly appreciated all the things your feet help you to do? Probably never.

And it’s the same way with our footer.

Much like the header, a good footer will also include important information. But this info isn’t necessarily the lifeblood of your website navigation.

As you can see, I’ve got a pretty basic footer, but it includes some information you won’t find directly available in the heading (i.e. Terms & Conditions, Guest Posts and my phone number).

Widget Areas

Depending on your theme, widgets can appear just about anywhere on your website. However, the most common area is on your website sidebar.

On my website, I’m using widgets to promote my new eBook and provide social proof through testimonials. Here’s a quick screengrab of my eBook promo:

This is a space where you can get very creative. Just think to yourself, “What could add value or entice readers if they saw it on multiple pages?”

For me, that was my eBooks and testimonials. It could be something entirely different for you!

Posts

Blogging is a powerful marketing tool when executed well. And when you create a new blog, you’ll add it as a new post. It’s really as simple as that.

With blogs, posts are the main focus of content. Sure, it’ll be surrounded by the header, footer and widget areas. But what people will really be paying attention to is the posts that you’re publishing on a regular basis.

Pages

Pages are a bit different than posts and can feel confusing for some. The main difference lies in their functionality. Essentially, a post goes into your blog feed, whereas a page is a standalone portion of your website.

As a business owner, you’ll use pages to setup the structure of your website. Home, About, Services and Contact should all be pages. However, once you start marketing and want to update your blog, then you’ll be creating posts.

Now that you know the 7 basic component of your website, it’s time to dig a bit deeper. Find my eBook promo in the widget area and download Unlocking WordPress. I’m pretty proud of this guide and believe it will be of immense value to you and your business.

One day at the travel startup where I work we had an interesting discussion about powering platforms. It turned out we were all convinced that WordPress was used mostly by people whose blogs were aimed to express their creators’ opinion for a tiny audience only. Having a closer look at the industry’s top blogs and websites, we soon realized what a huge mistake we made!

You might be surprised like us when you find out that some of the biggest websites on the Internet are powered by WordPress. Here are top ten major business giants who decided to go with WP when establishing their online presence. Number 8 is especially impressive!

1. BBC America

This American TV giant decided to create a functional website which serves as home for its various shows. They chose to power it with nothing else but WordPress. The website itself is pretty complicated – each site has its own child theme, which is always powered by the main framework. Impressive, isn’t it?

2. Sony Music

Everyone knows the stars Sony represented at various stages of music history. From Michael Jackson and Justin Timberlake to Britney Spears and Celine Dion – Sony Music set up their online presence, choosing to power their incredibly captivating website with modest WordPress. Way to go WP!

3. TechCrunch

This is a website everyone in the tech industry should know – to put it simply, it’s the best technology news platform around. You can only imagine the amount of news pieces and articles added every day – and yet it keeps its structure thanks to WordPress.

4. Reuters

Reuters is a major global news agency and its blogs deliver some of the most significant news to decision makers all over the world – all this thanks to WordPress. If they chose to go with WP, it really means something.

5. StyleWatch

Created by PEOPLE’s magazine editors, StyleWatch is a website that offers all the wealth of celebrity fashion and beauty looks in one place. Even though the website is pretty complex and image heavy, WordPress makes it seem easy breezy and functional. If that’s not impressive, we don’t know what is.

6. PoliticalTicker

It’s safe to say that CNN is a big fan of WordPress – not only does it power many blogs of some of their famous on-air personalities, like Anderson Cooper or Dr. Sanjay Gupta, but also the special platform dedicated to bringing the latest campaign coverage and political news straight from CNN’s Best Political Team. If this news giant trusts WP, so should you.

7. MTV Newsroom

This is a blog brought by MTV, easily the most popular TV music network worldwide. The blog is there to give users a glimpse into the life of the newsroom – behind the scene footage and exclusive material sneak peeks are regular features. This is all again the power of WordPress – not bad, huh?

8. The New Yorker

This legendary magazine has just recently embraced the power of WordPress and revamped its website. By employing WP, they were looking forward to create a more readable and cleaner site. They also made sure that the website is easy to navigate for mobile users, who are actually the fastest-growing segment of the magazine’s readership.

9. Ebay Inc.

This is a blog that grants a glimpse into the everyday life at one of the global e-commerce giants. In order to engage more with their consumers, Ebay chose WordPress and it’s been enjoying it until today. This is surely a big win for WordPress.

10. GigaOM

Om Malik launched GigaOM to unravel all the ins and outs of the Silicon Valley and he chose to build a network of blogs – all powered by nothing else than WordPress. Despite the complicated structure, WP has proven to be just perfect to do this kind of job.

The examples above make it clear that WordPress is on its way to become a major player on the website developing scene. Every day we see more and more brands deciding to provide some valuable content and what’s a better way to do great content marketing than with a blog? If you decide to go for it, WordPress will be there to help you make the most of your online presence.

Your Website Management Team

Rachel Pfanz and Emily Journey lead the WP Artisans team. They enjoy helping business owners leverage technology to increase sales and social impact.

What People Are Saying

WP Artisans has managed our website for 3 years and at least 80% of our business has come from the website they developed and manage for us. We’ve tried print, radio and online ads, but nothing compares to a website that is functional, well designed, and at the top of the list. WP Artisans knows how to do this and the web site is the single biggest reason we have grown from 3 planes to six planes in just two years."

Pat Rooney, Owner, Sundowner Aviation

Emily Journey and WP Artisans are not only the "Real Deal" when it comes to website management and SEO but are also incredibly knowledgeable, experts in what they do and good people! They completely redid our two websites www.ezshelf.com and www.brillseat.com. We previously tried numerous other firms some from India, others with an office here and work done in Eastern Europe, and others - our website prior to WP Artisans was a hodge-podge of hard coding, and over 39 plugins. It was impossible for us to maintain the websites by ourselves and SEO was like a secret language only our previous consultants knew. Emily and WP Artisans are committed to removing the curtain hiding the "Wizard of Oz" and to empowering individuals and companies to take back their website and marketing.

David Jablow, Founding Partner, EZShelf and BrillSeat

Emily manages my real estate website and is a great person to work with! She is always quick to respond to maintenance requests and she goes above and beyond so my website ensures the success of my business. I highly recommend her services!

Adam Knolls, Real Estate Broker, RE/MAX Revealty

Emily does a terrific job managing our Capital List web site! Not only does she provide extraordinary service but she also does a great job on coaching you about how to improve traffic. We've had several web sites over the years and Emily has been the very best person to work with on this vital part of our business.

This website is not affiliated with or sponsored by Automattic, Inc., The WordPress Foundation, or the WordPress Open Source Project.

In the spirit of full disclosure, some of the links on my site are affiliate links, which means that I may get a small commission if you decide to purchase anything from recommended companies. I only recommend products & systems that I use and love myself, so I know you’ll be in good hands.